Calling for a Collective Black Translanguaging Approach to Phonics Instruction

This paper is a call to imagine a new future: one that cherishes the beauty of Black Language for young bilingual Black children learning to connect sounds and symbols in classrooms across the country. In current schooling, realizing this future will require substantial imagination and creativity to bend our approaches to reading and mend areas that have done damage. It also requires us to imagine and institutionalize new ways of identifying approaches that could be scaled across the country while also flexible enough to nuance different geographies and locales. This future will require new bridges across disciplines, methodologies, and expertise to innovate ways to make Black Language celebration a reality. To embark on this future, we offer philosophical principles for imagined pedagogies. We envision these principles overarching new pedagogies practitioners innovate in the classroom as well as new protocols and practices scholars develop through research.